


Summer of Blood

by inkasrain



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 14:52:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkasrain/pseuds/inkasrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one of intellect believed the stories anymore, how Sozin's Comet, blazing and terrible, had seared the heavens and turned the Fire Nation mad. Mai did not expect them to to understand.</p><p>Chapter 5: Mai remembers the Red Trials.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Later historians, when studying that curious period of carnage and slaughter, called it the Red Month. In recounting their tales and fantasies, the superstitious named it the Madness.

For Mai, it was the summer of blood.

\--

No one of intellect believed the stories anymore. How Sozin's Comet, blazing and terrible, had seared the heavens and turned the Fire Nation mad. Exaggeration, the scholars claimed. Simple enough to explain rationally; desperate for victory, Ozai had simply goaded his people into a patriotic frenzy and let them loose. The presence of the comet, they said, was merely a dramatic coincidence, fodder for the fools who twisted history to their advantage.

True, it was rare for such a manic state to be sustained for the long span of a month; unusual too, for the frenzy to work on so vast a population, and survive in the face of such outrageous horrors.

A terrible thing, an unlikely thing. But not impossible.

***

Mai did not expect them to understand, nor did their ignorance concern her; she felt very deeply that that summer of long-ago was far better remembered as a bland note in the history books than anything nearer to the truth. But Mai had often wondered at the ability of her children's children to comprehend those dreadful truths, even if she had chosen to share them. She had never been a bender, but whether through the intuition of age or some other instinct, she had no doubt; that ancient power was dying, draining from the world as the Avatar spirit before it. And as it died, so failed the ability of the young to understand.

And so Mai listened as the infant wise quoted their scholars, as they re-imagined the lives her friends and enemies had lived, as they volleyed theories of Ozai's Fall. She could have corrected them a thousand times over; she never did. Mai watched through dimming eyes as those who called themselves masters failed to produce what her friends once had in the blush of childhood. And she felt it within her as slowly, sadly, that once tremendous force became a skill, a talent, a mere curiosity. It would likely outlive her. But not by very long.

***

But these were thoughts of the night, of the still hours when Mai lay alone and listened to the quiet pulse of the world. During the day, she occupied herself with life; with slow, stately walks, with painting, with tea. It was an absurdly dull life. She would have despised it when she was young, perhaps even spoken brashly of preferring death. But Mai had seen enough of death, and had learned long ago not to wish for what would come on its own. Life-- aching and quiet and precious and dull-- was all she wanted now.

Her children wanted more.

***

The long argument ended suddenly, and too innocently for Mai to errect her habbitual iron defenses. "Mother," her daughter Zana had said one evening. "Tomo asked me earlier if he could speak with you. He's writing his thesis for the University, do you remember? He wants to interview you about…ah…"

Zana stopped, tongue held by her brush with ever-threatening transgression. Mai held up her good hand in silent warning, veined and lightly spotted, but still lily-white. Even her own children, through all the long years, had hesitated to question their mother of the past; she had only to shift her right hand in their sight to quell their questions.

But in recent years the gesture and its implications seemed to have lost its potency. _It was history_ , her children said, as they had so many times. Didn't she want her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren, to know of her deeds? Why wouldn't she let them tell the world of their brilliant matriarch, who had fought so bravely as the longest war died in agony?

Unspoken beneath these high claims of familial honor, Mai could hear quite their deeper intentions like the bass line of a simple symphony. They craved the whispered knowledge, the answer to the old mysteries that had drifted on the horizon of their childhoods like ancestral spirits. And they needed answers before their mother finally relinquished her iron grip on the living world.

"What did you say to him?" Mai's voice was softer now, but the old edge remained. "What does the boy expect to hear?" Zana was silent for a moment. "Whatever you wish to tell him, Mother."

***

Tomo arrived the following afternoon. Shrewd timing on the boy's part; it was still early spring, and night would fall before long if either of them wished to end the interview abruptly. Another not-unlikely thing; Mai's lips twitched in approval.

She waited on the small veranda behind the house, where she could watch winter as slowly lost its grip on the earth. Her youngest grandchild was prompt, of course, like every other dry-nosed scholar she had met. "Grandmother," he said as he knelt, with a solemnity so thick he might have been addressing her shrine. "I am honored that you have agreed to speak with me."

Mai studied him. Pale, serious, a streak of young arrogance dazzling his eyes; so very like her dead husband. Mai wondered, suddenly, what the boy saw as he looked at her like that. An old woman, clearly, though her face had not wrinkled so much as set deeper into its hard, familiar lines that spoke quite clearly of her age and attitude. Her hair was not gray but deep, lustrous silver; her eyes were weak, but bright and clear. It struck Mai suddenly that Azula would have been devastatingly jealous at seeing her so well preserved. The dead princess would have aged like her mother, a beauty in youth, all loveliness stolen by treacherous age. Life had been deeply unkind to Ursa, though death, at least, saw her true beauty remembered.

And then Mai noticed that Tomo's eyes had traveled to her right hand, resting on the arm of her chair. She had ceased bothering to conceal it years before, but now she wondered if the sight frightened him. Physical evidence of war often did that to those who dallied too long in libraries. She forced her lips not to curl in distaste.

"Nonsense," Mai answered finally, her voice brisk with decision. "I haven't passed on to the spirits just yet. It isn't as though I had to make a particularly long trip."


	2. Heat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everywhere, restlessness; everywhere, fever.

Mai sat back in her chair, and pondered the idiocy of scholars.

Over the course of her life, she had had the misfortune to become acquainted with several men and women who called themselves wise; and worse, to attend their funerals. There was no occasion that gave scholars more license to talk than the death of a crony, and while Mai appreciated the irony of so much breath being wasted on the dead, the hours wasted left her bitter. She could never understand why the living insisted on looking backwards so often; and to make the past a life's work, as the scholarly set did, seemed to Mai the height of petty foolishness.

A small, pompous cough punctuated her thoughts. "There," said Tomo, as he laid a final sheet of parchment on the portable desk he had been assembling for the past quarter-hour. "I am all ready, Grandmother."

"So soon?" she said, lightly, and the smallest flush touched the young man's pale cheeks. _Scholars_. "I, ah, I have questions prepared, Grandmother, if you would not mind my taking the, ah… taking the…"

Mai sighed. "Yes, boy, ask your questions. I certainly don't know where to begin. Agni knows, I've lived a very long time."

Tomo spent a few minutes verifying the facts of her birth and early years. There were records, of course, but Mai preferred to extend relating this neutral portion of her history, and raised no objection. "Now," her grandson muttered, scanning his fresh notations, "The Red Month and the Fall occurred in the fifth year of Ozai's reign. You would have been 16, yes, Grandmother?"

"I was."

"Where were you when the atrocities began?" Tomo wet his brush, and sat poised, waiting.

Mai gazed out at the small, sprawling garden beneath her short balcony. It was a harsh and beautiful view; a few early blossoms fluttered on the long, lean branches of the peach tree, tender spokes of green poked up from the old winter mulch. A view that suited her; a fitting backdrop for this interview, this… confession.

"I was in the Old Capital."

Her grandson's eyebrows rose. "The Capital? But why, Grandmother? You were raised largely in Omashu, were you not?"

A grim smile touched Mai's thin lips; they had come to the first little lie, the first seed she had planted to hide the past and begin her life anew. "No," she said. "I lived in Omashu for less than a year. My father was appointed governor there when I was fifteen, and I left shortly after my sixteenth birthday. When the Comet came, I was living in my parent's home in the Capital."

"I… I see." Tomo put down further notes in his delicate script. "You must have been right at the heart of things, then. The worst of the atrocities were recorded in the areas near the Old Capital; the Fire Nation death toll was highest there, strangely enough." He wet his brush again. "Can you describe it, Grandmother? How did the madness begin?"

She took a long, slow breath. "The heat," she said, and in spite of herself, Mai shivered.

***

The heat came before Sozin's Comet reared in the sky, a herald leached from brightest hell.

It was colossal. It was a physical thing, a _presence_ , flowing across the Fire Nation like an ocean of melted rock. The air itself seemed to sag, steaming, all around them; it shifted and shimmered, painting the world in hazy reds and golds. Everywhere, restlessness; everywhere, fever. Mai remembered a perpetual blush, breathless spasms of hollow lust almost painful in their futility, nights cut short and stifling.

The Fire Nation writhed for a week in that state of half-seduction. Noblewomen were kept indoors by their husbands and fathers, while their sons prowled the streets, hungry. The heat and the tension climbed with every sunrise; the spates of lust grew longer, and the noise of the city grew louder.

Mai spent the days with Azula and Ty Lee, languorous and itchy on sweat-stained silk. The princess had to be forcibly confined, as for the first time in her memory, the Fire Lord had restricted her movements to the palace. He allowed only her two friends for company, and male guards were banished from Azula's wing on pain of death. It was torturous, but Ozai knew both the looming storm, and his daughter. Royal virtue was too valuable to chance.

And then, seven days after the first symptoms, the night broke to a red sky. The sun nearly disappeared, reduced to a dim, pale orb, suffocated by the brilliance that was the Comet. It seared the heavens, this gift of Agni, a flaming mass of energy and searing light. It daubed the clouds with celestial blood; the world turned red, cast anew in ruddy, shifting brightness. Shadows seemed to wane and die, trees began to burn, and the very ground seemed to buck in heat beneath their feet.

On the morning of that eighth day, the Fire Nation went mad.

***

"…Seemed as if the Fire Nation had gone mad," her grandson repeated, as he copied down her words. "Fascinating, Grandmother. So it really seemed to you that the Comet brought this change? Were there no mass rallies, no patriotic demonstrations? Many have posited—"

"No," said Mai, her voice harsh from unaccustomed use. "The politics came _after_ , boy, not before. Sozin's war was over for most by then; it was the Comet that ended it for us all." She met his gaze, and she knew her eyes burned. When her patience with modern theories and other nonsense had died, she was not sure; but Mai knew that she could not hear it another word of it.

Tomo's mouth was open slightly; it seemed she had shocked him. For a moment, he seemed far younger than his twenty-four years. "Yes, Grandmother," he said, quietly.

A silence fell between them. Tomo shuffled his papers, fiddled with his brush. Mai let him sit, grimly sipped the cooling tea her maid had brought her. Her right hand had begun to ache for the first time in years; cursing herself and this ridiculous urge, she said, "Well?"

Her grandson started. "Ah… would, sh-shall we continue, Grandmother? I, I can return another—"

"No," she snapped; the truth had begun to throb inside her, and she needed it finally gone. " Ask your next question."


	3. Consequence

It could have been an hour.

Of sensation, only flashes remained, endless moments seared in her memory. The bright eyes of a dark prince as she joined him in ecstasy; an arc of blood, shining as it whipped through the air. The salty tang of sweat and tears of joy, meeting her tongue. Screams of death and agony, mingled with an almost musical hum in her ears. Burning flesh and hair, the smoke seeping into her pores, a carnal perfume.

Hot bodies pressed against her own; metal once cool inside her sleeves now searing her skin with their glorious heat.

Of thoughts and reason, there was very little. Mai remembered most a sense of strength and power she had never conceived; a wave of victory and violence that carried her, spoke to her… needed her. She had known no doubts, no remorse; just a driving, irresistible need to conquer and kill, to use the strength given her for some unknown and wonderful end. Body and spirit were one, or perhaps they were nothing, all identity washed from a form no longer truly hers. She and her nation were slaves of this force, bound and beholden to the core of their natures, the celestial source of their power; they wanted and loved it, and they had no choice.

It could have been an hour. It could have been a year.

\--

"One month," whispered her grandson. "All that carnage, all that death… in just one month." The boy's voice was low and anguished now, and he skimmed his sheets of facts and numbers in what seemed like desperation. "Forty-thousand is the lowest estimated toll. And sixty percent of the dead were Fire Nation… How… how is such a thing possible?"

Tomo met her eyes; his gaze was young, and almost accusing. Mai ached for him; she could give him no answers he would take easily.

"It was the Comet," she said, low and calm. The worst of it was over, she knew; her crimes were at last confessed. "It took us in its palm and crushed us, melted us down so that only our cores remained. And our cores belonged to it."

The scholar simply looked at her; the shock had not yet faded from his eyes or his face, but as she watched, his professional skepticism began to creep forward, erasing those lines of belief.

"You will never truly understand this," she said. "It is a thing beyond your time. The power of spirits and the strength they give has largely left the world by now; I see no way to impress on you how real this was, how much it shaped us. When the last Avatar was slain--"

"The Avatar was a diplomat," her grandson said. "Appointed in the earliest times to mediate and keep peace between the nations. What bending abilities he may have had… they simply aren't relevant. There are efforts to reinstate that position today, did you know that, Grandmother? Most of the candidates being considered have no bending abilities at all, much less control of all the elements." Tomo's tone was brisk, confident. Like all good scholars, he kept the theory, defended the writ in the face of any doubt. This was, Mai realized, the lens he used to view his world. An absurd, flimsy, shallow lens it was… but he loved it, and would not see beyond it.

It chafed at her, but there it was. The truth, Mai had long been forced to see, was often replaced to serve those who came after. No amount of truth would change minds like the one before her, and the thought of insistence wearied her bones.

"As you wish," she said, quietly.


	4. Awakening

"Well," said Tomo, "That covers the Madness, I suppose." An air of satisfied accomplishment had settled about him; Mai spared a moment to muse how much scholarship must be simple self-deception. "What happened after all that, Grandmother?" the boy continued. "I've studied the aftermath of the Madness, of course, but the records are all rather terse. What was the general mood in the Capital?"

Mai smiled, cold and grim. "I was not in the Capital when the month ended," she said.

Her grandson looked up in surprise, and began to shuffle through his papers seemingly by instinct. "Ah… but Grandmother, you told me yourself you were in the Capital when the Madness began," he said, a touch of concern in his voice. Tomo extended a sheet of parchment, painted with his delicate characters, and indicated her discrepant words. "You see? Of course," he said, and his brow cleared, as though understanding, "I mean also the fields and areas around the city. I imagine some higher citizens may have been evacuated to safer areas--"

Mai laughed.

\--

Cold. That was the first reality to return.

Others followed with cruel haste; hunger, exhaustion, a growing spike of terror in her blood. Then awareness rose with her senses. She was kneeling on an endless plain of dewy grass, shivering as a wan and pale sun rose before her. Vast walls of stone rose in the near distance, swatting at her memory, feeding her fear. She was alone.

Mai tried to stand, but her knees gave out; she found she was trembling from head to foot. Forcing control into limp limbs and muscles, she began to look herself over. Her skin and clothes were stiff, and heavy; exhausted, terrified, half starved, it took a moment for Mai to understand why.

She was covered in blood.

Most of it was dry and black by now, but splatters across her bodice and skirt still glistened with life recently shed. She ran her hands, stained brown with vital fluid, down the front of her robe; silk turned rough with gore met her touch. Most of her hair was matted and hard with the stuff, and Mai wondered, dazed with horror, if she would even recognize her own face.

A scouting party from Ba Sing Se found her, hours later; she had not moved. Wild urges to run, to strike with weapons long since spent rose within her, but she was powerless. They asked for her name and her home, and she told them as they bound her. Their eyes were hollow, their faces gaunt; they threw her over the back of a mount, and warned her not to move; they would kill her. Mai believed them, and almost asked for death.

Tomo had stopped writing. Mai watched him; his head was bowed, his hands gripped tightly in his lap. Once again they sat unspeaking, this silence broken only by her grandson's ragged breath.

\--

Minutes passed. Mai, watching darkness settle in her garden, had almost drifted into an uneasy doze when her grandson spoke suddenly. The words seemed wrenched from his mouth, as though he could scarcely justify or countenance their existence.

"Grandmother," he said, "Is this… is this true?" Mai made to answer, but he barged ahead. "It's impossible." Tomo rose and began to pace before her, hands twisting in agitation. "Impossible… a month of your life with no memory? A… a sixteen year old girl reaching Ba Sing Se on foot from the Old Capital? To wake up doused inblood? Grandmother…" he paused, breathing deeply, clearly struggling to regain control, and in spite of herself, Mai felt a cruel curiosity bubbling under natural concern. What else could this rigid young mind conjure to circumvent her honesty?

"Grandmother," the young scholar began again, meeting her eyes directly. "Why would you say these things? Why would you tell me all this? It… it cannot possibly be true."

Mai closed her eyes. She had accepted his folly, his blindness, countless times over the past hours; this should be no different.

And yet, it was.

Why? The tired old woman in her demanded. Why bother the boy any more? What good will it do you?

"I am ninety-one years old," she said softly, more to herself than her audience. "And I have been damned many times over. But never once as a liar."

She looked sharply at her grandson; locked in her gaze, he settled slowly back to his desk, staring at her. Mai steeled herself; why was it harder to ask than to answer?

"I wonder, grandson. What do the scholars say of the Red Trials?"


	5. Judged by the Stones

There was an instant of peace as Tomo drew breath, over before it began. "The Red Trials," her grandson repeated, his voice blank. "A series of hearings and executions of Fire Nation royalty in the weeks following Ozai's Fall." Tomo paused, habit relinquishing its grip on his tongue. "Grandmother, why--"

"Is that all?"

Once again he stopped, seeming to gather information from the long shelves of his mind. "Well… yes, Grandmother, I believe it is. There are, there are…" The boy swallowed. "Ah… accounts of the exact proceedings, naturally, but I admit that my own field of interest lies more in the… the civilized aftermath of the Madness."

"I see," said Mai. She watched him closely, part of her wondering how had it come to this. How had such malignant, happy blindness been preserved so long that shewas the only one left to destroy it? Why had she been given the scythe?

 _I was born to be a blade,_ she thought sadly.

\--

The prisoners watched from a guarded balcony, packed in aching rows designed to leave their view unobstructed. The message was blunt as their captors; they were every one meant to watch. Those who survived the coming days were meant to remember.

Mai stood pressed against her fellow captives; the stench rising from the prison balcony was the stuff of nightmares, but it no longer troubled her. Six days had slipped by since her awakening, and she was numb to the root of her soul.

The Fire Nation prisoners taken near Ba Sing Se had been carted in wagons back to their wrecked and smoldering capital. Their hands and feet were manacled in stone, and a heavy collar rested on every neck. They were forbidden to speak or rise without orders; they were fed, but remained in the tattered, stinking clothing that bore witness to their crimes.

Now the same group waited under the cold, brilliant moon for some unknown end. Half-formed fears had begun to shift at the back of Mai's uneasy mind, but she had no strength to study or kill them. She watched the moon instead, wondering what the spirit saw as she gazed on the distant earth, wondering what she knew.

\--

"You were a prisoner of war, Grandmother?" her grandson whispered, face white. "You… you witnessed the Red Trials? How… why have you never—"

'Hush." Mai's voice was like a whip; Tomo flinched, and fell mercifully silent.

\--

Ozai was the first.

It was natural, of course. The Earth Kingdom was parched for vengeance, and who better to whet their thirst than the Fire Lord? More would come after, but someone must have judged it best to begin with the safest death.

They walked the Phoenix King out into the courtyard (once a palace sporting pavilion—Mai recognized it suddenly.) Ozai's hair hung wild and loose, and he was naked to the waist. His chest, his arms, the ragged shreds of his pants all bore the same bloody dye as so many of his subjects. His face was dark with gore as well, but Mai would have recognized him anywhere. Captured, degraded and filthy, rings of stone wound as restraints around his body, Ozai was perhaps more a sovereign than he had ever been.

They read off his crimes; hours passed. Citizens of the Earth Kingdom and members of the Water Tribes hurled garbage and screamed obscenities, often drowning the voices of the magistrate. A sweet keening laced through the noise, but Mai couldn't tell if it came from the spectators or the prisoners.

At last, the magistrate turned stiffly to a small council seated behind him and all the noises died.

"These are the crimes for which Ozai, son of Azulon, is brought before you today," he said, and although his voice was not loud, it echoed across the courtyard and through Mai like a bell. "What punishment do you accord him?"

The question trembled in the air for what seemed a lifetime. And then—

"Death," came the terse reply. The Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes erupted, and all around her, Mai felt a shiver pass through the prisoners.

They did it then, forcing the Fire Lord to his knees in the center of the courtyard, and taking his head off with a single swing of a stone blade. Blood sprayed across the pale stone of the courtyard, a terrible, pulsing arc of red; Mai closed her eyes, feeling the heat grow behind them.

\--

Tomo was green, sweating through his stiff robes. Mai called for more tea, and they drank together. At last, the boy laid down his cup and made to rise.  
"Thank you, Grandmother," he began, tripping over his words. "Thank- thank you for his interview, I believe I have all I need, I must be—"

"Sit," Mai ordered.

He sat, slowly, meeting her iron gaze with desperate eyes. She spoke before he could start again.

"You started this, grandson. And I will finish it."

\--

Mai did not first recognize the next figure they brought in; or perhaps she just didn't want to.

The girl was too small, too weak, too… dead. Her shoulders were dropped, her head hung as though in exhaustion or despair. She could not, or would not stand; guards gripped both her arms to keep her upright, and her legs curled, limp, beneath her. She was painted in dried blood, over every inch of her skin, even more than her father before her.

Azula seemed like a cotton doll, shrunken after happy play in the bath.

And that was the truth, Mai suddenly understood. The ecstasy of the Comet had given her princess life, strength, happiness she had never known. Even Azula's greedy mind could not conceive of such heights, and when they came to her, she had drunk from that endless well and used its power.

The Comet filled her that month, gave her everything. And then it drained her dry.

And Mai gazed down at Azula, and saw that she was already dead. She breathed, but her soul was gone, extinguished with the force that brought her to life.

And so she watched through cold eyes as they read Azula's crimes, listened as they jeered and spat, as they ordered her death.

Mai looked on, calm and empty, as the Princess's blood ran through the stones, mingling with her father's. She made no sound, watching the moon disappear in the brightening dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a LONG time ago and posted it (in a slightly different incarnation) on another site. My interest in ATLA recently being rekindled by KORRA, I decided to refresh it here, and see what I might be able to bring to it five-or-something-crap-that-was-a-long-time-ago later.


End file.
